Ricki Dwyer

BIO

Ricki Dwyer is an artist and educator living in San Francisco, California. Their work and research center on the cultural effects of industrialization and global neoliberalism through textile history and economic theory. As a weaver, their material practice frames embodied knowledge as both a lineage of skilled labor and a collective haptic awareness informed by textiles. Ricki is currently teaching with California College of the Arts, holding a studio fellowship with UC Berkeley, and the 2021 Facebook Artist In Residence. They received their undergraduate degree from Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA from UC Berkeley. They have exhibited with Anglim Gilbert, Eleanor Harwood, Guerrero Gallery, and the Berkeley Art Museum. They have been artists in resident with Recology San Francisco, Jupiter Woods Gallery London, The Textile Arts Center New York, and The White Page Gallery Minneapolis. They have been recipients of the NEA Grant, Eisner Prize, Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, and the Queer Cultural Center’s Emerging Scholar Award.

STATEMENT

2021 marks my ten-year anniversary with the loom. The relationship has encoded by the body with an emotional temperament that carries over into all ways I engage with the world. Inserted into the ancestry of skilled labor, manual dexterity, and spirituality of world-building, being a weaver has to lead my artistic practice. I have allowed my own identity construction to be understood through the fluid and contextually determined material of cloth. I honor drapery as the negotiation that things will never fall the same way twice.  In a space of speculation, I address the practice of weaving as an allegory for the social organization as well as self-determination. Often referencing textile history and the cosmological mythology of weaving, my work explores the relationships between individual autonomy and community strength. The work implicates both individual threads and the entirety of the cloth as raw materials. Many individual threads making up a stronger whole.

Interview with Ricki Dwyer

Written by Andreana Donahue

Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became interested in becoming an artist? What were some early influences?

I got to grow up in an incredibly beautiful part of the world, West Marin County outside San Francisco. It’s a place that, at the time, was kind of an affluent white mecca for retired hippies and liberals with kids. It was a very supportive environment for creativity. Legacies of Northern California communes, land projects, jam bands, gurus, and leaders were around in a nostalgic and non-ironic way. I think a lot of my suburban teenage angst was towards all those people around me who were searching for The Way or trying to find The Path. I was a very angry kid. By the time I got to high school, it was clear that art spaces were where the other freaks were too. The freaks and the queers and the stoners and the depressed kids. In a way, it was an outlet for rebellion, in another way it was my own avenue of seeking answers.

In college, my history of fibers course changed the way I saw the world. The course drew lines between histories centering on women’s labor, indigenous production methods, histories of colonization, economies of industrialization, contemporary environmental concerns, and aesthetics of identity. Studying textiles became a way for me to study how we arrived here in this world with this global economy and this formation of political power. I think the only other thing that would have felt as vast would have been to study farming and the production of food systems.

Where are you currently based and what initially attracted you to working in this community? Are there any aspects of this specific place that have surfaced in your work?

I’m still in San Francisco, I’ve been back here since 2012 when I helped build out a warehouse with a bunch of friends from college. I never thought I would end up back in the Bay Area after moving away at 16, in some ways I felt dragged back but I am grateful for it. My friends and my world here are always surfacing in my work. During the pandemic, I lost track of my sense of time so I made work affected by the Bay weather. Traces of fog rusting bolts staining cloth, letting the environment permeate my studio, helped with a lot of dissociation during that period. I could watch the air alter the surface of the work and know time was passing. I’m always looking for ways to capture a memory in my materials so that in the future I can locate this work in a feeling of who I was with and who I was and what we did together and what our love felt like.

Can you tell us about your studio space? What are some of the most crucial aspects of a studio that make it workable for you?

I have a dreamy shed on the edge of the San Francisco Bay overlooking the city. I have ample outdoor space for dyeing as well as two-floor looms and an area to mockup work. It’s quiet, in a eucalyptus grove, and there’s no wifi so it’s just me and the loom and the radio. I am really very lucky to have a private studio right now. I know I can make it work in a more social environment at some point, but it has been a gift having isolated space these last four years.

What is a typical day like?

On a good day, I get to read for an hour before breakfast, catch up with my housemate while preparing food for the day, head to the studio and work from around 11-7, come home and address emails while eating dinner. On a great day, I get to the ocean as well.

What gets you in a creative groove? What puts a damper on your groove?

It really always is and always will be my friends. Other people’s work, or getting to work with other people, often gets me off. Getting to support a friend with a project, or having someone through the studio to work together, seeing really good work in the world, I feed off that. It’s hard for my heart to keep going in isolation.

I also get really turned on by durable civic infrastructure. Right now it’s been playgrounds and this one public pool in Norman, Oklahoma which has water park slides. Rope to enamel-coated pipe joinery, the aesthetic repetition of bolts, an evenly tensioned umbrella canopy, the mechanized bucket dropping water sculpture, heavy utility excites me.

What criteria do you follow for selecting materials? Do you prefer to maintain a narrow focus or work across diverse media? How do you navigate the limitations and possibilities that result from this path?

I do wonder if I will ever feel limited by working at the loom. For now, it’s a compulsion that fosters discipline across materials even when it demands the majority of my time. I do end up spending quite a bit of my time with yarn and dye, and it is easy to consider the rest of my materials as an armature for cloth. That separation allows me to lean into the pleasure of dissonance. In drapery, I find the poetics of things never falling quite the same way twice. Highlighting that mutability against the permanence of welded steel or ceramic is an easy way to consider mania, emotional swings, cognitive dissonance, dialectical framing. There is a compare and contrast element involved in holding up oppositional material properties, an initial moment of addressing binary thought. It is easy to feel antagonized by dualism in the US today when there is still a facade of this two-party political system and a violently legislated gender binary.

But really I’m just choosing materials I have crushes on.

Can you walk us through your overall process? How would you describe your approach to manipulating materials? What about decision-making and editing?

I think my work is both site-specific and opportunity-driven. I am mostly motivated to respond to spaces and social engagements. Within that logic, I am also making fabrication choices around resources and where I enjoy spending time. I have been afforded access to ceramics recently because a dear friend has space to share and the energy is enriching between us. Before the world shut down I had a supportive friendship with a queer elder running a metal shop. Building relationships, in particular queer and trans kinship, is what drives most of my decisions.

Do you pursue any collaborations, projects, or careers in addition to your studio practice? If so, can you tell us more about those projects, and are there connections between your studio practice and these endeavors?

I am currently on the curatorial council of Southern Exposure, a non-profit gallery in San Francisco, and have been teaching with California College of the Arts prior to the pandemic. I certainly find there to be connections between teaching art and working in the studio, curating as well as exhibiting. They’re all avenues to be in dialogue around material conversations, our ideals, our lives. But it’s my dream to work with teens again. I look forward to being a high school art teacher someday.

Can you share some of your recent influences? Are there specific works—from visual art, literature, film, or music—that are important to you?

It’s hard to believe it has been almost a decade, but I was living in Berlin when dOCUMENTA (13) was up in Kassel. I was exposed to Ryan Gander, Tino Sehgal, Ceal Floyer, and Trisha Donnelly, and they collectively reoriented how I experienced work.

As far as weavers go, Josh Faught’s installation at the Oakland Columbarium was extremely influential, as well as Diedrick Bracken’s Darling Divined. In terms of shaping my relationship to cloth, I think of Robert Morris’s felt works, Felix Gonzales-Torres’s billboard of an empty bed, Sam Gilliam, and what Eric N. Mack is doing now as a painter, and Sonya Clark.

Who are some contemporary artists you’re excited about? What are the best exhibitions you’ve seen in recent memory?

This past spring Trimble/Anglim gallery showed Jerome Caja in San Francisco. That was a particularly special show, heartbreaking. In 2019 I saw Pope. L’s Choir at the Whitney the same weekend as Hans Haacke’s Blue Sail at the New Museum, both of which harness ambiance and the air of the room as a primary material concern. This summer the di Rosa in Napa has a stellar ceramic show of Nicki Green, Maria Paz, and Sahar Khoury. At some point before the pandemic, I got to see Gordon Hall read their piece “Why I don’t talk about The Body”, which has stayed with me a while.

Do you have any tips or advice that someone has shared with you that you have found particularly helpful?

Once I had a really special night on a porch in North Carolina with Tim Kerr of the Big Boys. We were at Black Mountain College overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains and we were all in rocking chairs. He told us we needed to go on tour like punk bands do and take our art with us. He talked about building a network of garage shows and how it could offset the networks formed through institutional access. It reshaped everything for me. I remember taking my sewing machine on tour for the rest of the summer. I embroidered patches of people’s tattoos at bars and libraries and coffee shops and bus stations. There was a more immediate sense of purpose and of having something to offer that changed the way I considered my practice and self-worth.

And David Hammons list of rules which say artists should work with what is free.

What are you working on in the studio right now? What’s coming up next for you?

In July I will be opening my recent work in a group show curated by Sam Vernon at Slash Art in San Francisco. A piece addressing the Spirit vs Flesh distinction, and my own self-positioning within an ancestry of labor. It is the first time I am working at this scale, with an extended line of sight over thirty feet tall. I have simultaneously woven four layers of cloth that unfold into a larger-than-me size hanging mobile. I am excited to break through the intimacy of textiles into the monumental.

Other than that I am looking forward to the show I am curating at Southern Exposure this fall. The show centers artists working autobiographically, and addresses the ways our practices have reared us and cycled back into that narrative of self-construction. Because 2021 is my ten-year anniversary working as a weaver at the loom, I have been reflecting on that relationship, on how my temperament has been shaped by that work.

To find out more about Ricki Dwyer check out their Instagram and website.